


Blessed Art Thou Amongst Women

by dagas isa (dagas_isa)



Category: Dead Like Me
Genre: Gen, Intersexuality, Non-Linear Narrative, Transfic Mini Fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-17
Updated: 2010-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:05:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dagas_isa/pseuds/dagas%20isa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Without the afterlife, Daisy would have never found her answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blessed Art Thou Amongst Women

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the transfic mini-fest on Dreamwidth. Prompt: Dead Like Me, intersex!Daisy, layers

**Seattle, Washington: 2008**

"So...what? You're really a boy? You've got like a little wang under that skirt or what." Mason looks intrigued. A little disgusted, but intrigued. Daisy knew she never should have told her little secret, it had just come out at Der Waffle Haus, when they got into the conversation about the best reap they've had. And of course, now he can't shut up.

"Mason! Have a little class!" Roxy admonishes him from the other table. George just sips her orange juice.

Daisy just shakes her head. "It's called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. All that...crap...that you've got running through your body that makes you all hairy and disgusting and gross, I'm immune to it. So instead of looking like a emaciated ogre, I look like this. Well, I do exercise proper hygiene and personal care, so even if I were a man, I'd still look better than you."

"So do you, in fact, have a wang?"

Daisy rolls her eyes. "You're never finding out. Kiffany! Check please."

Death is long, too long sometimes, but not long enough to waste time explaining.

**Greenwich, Connecticut: 1906**

No one notices anything strange when the first child of Theodore and Celeste Adair of Greenwich, Connecticut is born. Dr. Parsons, perhaps seems a little confused for a second, but the lungs are healthy, and the baby is rosy and pink which is all one can reasonably hope for a birth.

"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Adair, it's a healthy baby girl."

Dr. Parsons doesn't tell the Adairs that something seems a little off about the new baby Adair, nor does he expect that the parents would pay him mind if he did. Parents enamored of their newborn child tended to be like that. Especially if everything looks okay.

They name her Daisy, a perfectly suitable girl's name. It seems to work for her. Plus, she's too pretty to be a boy.

So Dr. Parsons closes his doctor's bag, makes some pronunciation about the newly-named Daisy that has nothing to do with a slightly larger than average clitoris, which is none of his business anyway, and about which neither the beaming mother or proud papa ask about, and prescribes six weeks of bed rest for mother and child.

**Los Angeles, California: 1929**

Daisy learns quickly the boundaries of the casting couch, at least as they apply to her. Full-intercourse is out. She tells herself it's because a real lady always saves something for later, but she knows how often sex hurts her and how disappointed the casting directors are when she allows them to go all the way. At least she never gets those roles she auditions for.

She tells herself, she enjoys being desired, she enjoys having rich, powerful men in the palm of her hand, or well, in other places. She gets her name associated with the rich and famous. Charlie Chaplin. Babe Ruth. She never did get past first base with Rudolph Valentino, but he definitely lost most of his appeal now that silent films are going the way of the stereoscope.

She's on the verge of stardom. Not at the level of her idols. Certainly not at the level of Greta Garbo, but then she never wanted to be left alone.

When she appears on screen, she makes herself memorable. Even where she is only a background player. She appears on the arms of the right people, if only for the fleeting fifteen minutes.

But when she goes home, she goes home alone. Freaks always remain alone.

 

**New York, New York: 1924**

"You see, Mrs. Adair, it's a bit complicated."

At eighteen, Daisy Adair and her mother wait outside the doctor's office, nervously awaiting the results of the most invasive examination that the elder Adair daughter has been through. To be honest, no one had thought anything strange about Daisy, until her younger sister Viola began to need sanitary products, and suddenly everyone, including Daisy, notices that she does not.

The verdict isn't what they expected. "Your daughter is a hermaphrodite."

"Pardon me?"

"Well, the more technical term would be male-bodied pseudo-hermaphrodite. Her genitalia are female, but upon further examination, we found testicular tissue."

"What does that mean? You mean our Daisy's a man?"

Daisy shifts uncomfortably. She still feels like a young woman. She wants to be an actress, the next Clara Bow or Lillian Gish. She wants to date actors like Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino, not be them. After she's a movie star, she wants to get married one day to someone rich and handsome and well-connected, perhaps have a child or two to dress-up and spend time with once, maybe twice, a month.

She barely hears as the doctor attempts to explain-without-explaining the ins and outs of Daisy's "condition" to her mother. She's too busy trying to figure out what this means, and what will have to change.

She's going to be an actress.

 

**Marietta, Georgia: 1938**

Daisy dies in a fire, in an old boarding house. She's passed out on the bed, unconscious. But 5 cocktails and some cognac straight up when she returns to her room will do that to her. As the flames engulf the house, and one-by-one people emerge, Daisy sleeps through it.

She wakes up among the ashes, some of which is probably her body. Lost. Alone. Her first moments in death are nothing different that her last moments in life, except soberer.

She remembers, afterward, the teenage girl who asked for her autograph, and then shook her hand. Maybe she remembers the vague rushing sensation of her soul leaving her body.

And she learns, from an old grandmother, that even in death, something will never end. She's a reaper. Daisy doesn't appreciate the world "grim" associated with her, but she is called to take souls from the soon-to-be departed.

Everyone dies, but Daisy is one of the lucky few to get an afterlife.

 

**New York, New York: 1987**

Daisy sits on a stepping stool, deep in the stacks of the medical library in Columbia University. That's what she is, she thinks, nose deep in an aspiring endocrinologist's dissertation research on intersexed individuals.

"Aren't I supposed to be going somewhere?" The aspiring endocrinologist, E.A. Ochoa, points to his body, now crushed in the compact shelving system.

"Shh. What's an androgen?" Daisy asks, adjusting her glasses. She came in disguise.

"You're not really a doctor, are you?"

Isn't that obvious? "Just answer the question."

"Androgens are hormones that stimulate or control the development of male primary and secondary characteristics."

Daisy returns to the article, which makes so much more sense now. "So, insensitivity would mean that the body is somehow immune to the effects of these androgens?"

"Essentially."

Oh. This is a new feeling, the pieces of an eighty-year-old puzzle falling into place. For decades the question has always lingered, even if the category undead person has been more prominent than "hermaphrodite" or anything else to do with her living body. Now she knows the answer.

It's a weight off of her that she never realized she had carried.

 

**Seattle, Washington: 2004**

"Who wouldn't want to be a girl? We're so much prettier than boys. You're kind of pretty."

"You make it look so effortless."

"Don't let the final picture fool you, this is two hours of hard labor in the morning."

"No. It's in everything you do. The way you walk, the way your hair flows. The way you move your hips, it's perfect."

Daisy just laughs it off as a flirtation. He's dead, he says, though she knows well enough that it doesn't always stop people from hitting on her. But she knows Stan, maybe only for a few hours now, but she's been much closer to his shoes then he can imagine. She knows what he says, what it means. It comes naturally to her, but she still wonders if it shouldn't be harder.

**Author's Note:**

> The closing bit of dialog is from Season 2 Episode 4.
> 
> And for a bit of making of. Originally the first section was last, and the last section was first. But reading it over, I didn't want to close on Mason being....Mason -.- so I ended up switching it around so the scene with Stan ended the story. I think it works better.


End file.
